The spiteful open-borders legacy of Joe Biden will plague America for generations to come, long after the former president is a fading bad memory.
Somewhere between 10 to 12 million foreign nationals are believed to have entered the U.S. illegally under his watch, to add to the existing 12 to 20 million illegal aliens.
They crossed the border for four years without background checks of the sort that American citizens must undergo to purchase a firearm or take out a loan.
When Americans were required to present multiple forms of identification to apply for a mandatory “real ID” to fly in 2025, millions of illegal entrants were flown across the country without any valid ID at all.
Trump’s border patrol would have to deport more than 8,000 people every day of his four-year tenure just to undo what Biden wrought by his dismantling of federal immigration law.
The Biden effort to destroy or subvert immigration law transcends just demolishing the Southern border.
There are nearly 300,000 Chinese nationals in American universities, the vast majority admitted without serious background checks.
They are welcomed by elite campuses because they pay the full cost and at a premium, with few questions asked about why exactly they came or what they are doing.
No wonder, then, that in the last decade, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government is reported to have trained and graduated hundreds of Chinese nationals who were either Communist Party members or the children of prominent Chinese communist apparatchiks.
In other words, at a time when the U.S. is locked in an escalating Cold War with the People’s Republic of China, our universities find great profit in enrolling and educating the communist elite who threaten Taiwan, imprison and oppress the Uyghurs, jail Hong Kong dissidents, and send both bio- and agro-terrorists into the U.S.
Not a day went by during the last two years without pro-Hamas visa students on some campus assaulting and bullying Jews, trashing iconic buildings, illegally camping out in student quads and screaming to bring the intifada home to the U.S.
Neither the Biden administration nor spineless college presidents took any action.
Most recently, Yunqing Jian, a 33-year-old Chinese national with ties to the University of Michigan, was arrested as an “agro-terrorist.”
The mission of Jian, along with his girlfriend, was to seed toxic fungus into Midwestern farmland as a way of destroying the American food supply and thereby starve his hosts.
Sometimes the baleful Biden immigration inheritance was simply a matter of allowing “tourists” and “visitors” to stay far after their visas had expired — without consequences.
Americans overwhelmingly polled against this Biden border nihilism. Indeed, the House impeached his henchman, Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of Homeland Security.
Yet Biden, or his handlers in the shadows, would not stop destroying the borders and immigration law.
So why would a president deliberately cause such mayhem that will cost hundreds of lives and billions of dollars in the years to come?
Was the reason Biden’s characteristic incompetence or dementia?
Or did Biden simply want to alter the demography to find a constituency for his otherwise unpopular agendas?
Did he wish to grow the welfare state?
Was Biden hoping to expand the DEI agenda by bringing in the poor and supposedly oppressed as new fodder in the Left’s Marxist binary of victimized versus victimizer?
No one knows why Biden did it, only that he did — and we will suffer his nihilist legacy for years to come.
Victor Davis Hanson is a historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.